Update to Ancestry DNA’s Parental Matches - Tue, 22 Aug 2023

Today, Ancestry sent me an email saying they updated the parent group assignments of my DNA matches:

Ancestry calls this technology SideView, and I first wrote about it last December in my article Evaluating Ancestry DNA’s Parental Matches where I compared Ancestry’s assignments to other methods and what other companies do.

These are what my new Parental Match assignments look like:

Comparing these assignments to the originals from Oct 2022 and the Jan 2023 updates, I get:

So they have been improving the number of matches assigned to either Maternal or Paternal, up from 20.5% in October to 22.4% now. and have increased the number assigned to both parents to 3.8%.

Due to my endogamy, I do expect to have a lot of people, especially those more distantly related, to show up under both parents, even though GEDmatch tells me my parents are not related.

My 3 highest Unassigned matches are NS (122 cM), AS (117 cM) and ZK (115 cM) and these are 3 matches that still are stumping me as to how they are related.

Doing good so far. They still have 73.8% to go.

A bit of an oddity is the “Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Islands” common community for my maternal side. I have no ancestors that were ever there. When I click on that box, it brings up this detail which includes the correct group:

Prior to the update, that common community was correctly listed as “Jews in Central & Eastern Europe” just like the Paternal.

Also, I find it interesting that the Last names in trees have changed significantly for the maternal and paternal groups even though their number of matches only increased 14%.

My maternal side last names previous were: Cohen, Klein, Rosenthal and Arbetter. They now are Barlin, Booke, Girman, Arbetter. I have first cousins with the surnames Barlin and Girman, so those make sense. But the other six surnames don’t exist in my tree on my mother’s side. Those will be surnames of ancestors of people I’m related to, but they would not be a common ancestor.

Similarly, my paternal side last names previous were: Cohen, Kaplan, Schwartz, Becker and now are Cohen, Berger, Berman, Meyer. Cohen of course is the world’s most common Jewish surname. I have a few Cohen’s in my tree related by marriage at 7 steps or more. I have some of the other names as 3rd or 4th cousins as well.

But overall, I can’t see the usefulness of these last names.